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Aug 2, 2015

EU Cookies

Notice from Google to Blogger blog managers: click image to enlarge
Recently Google let bloggers know that it had placed a warning about its use of browser cookies on Blogger blogs.

Here is what it looks like for folks in the European Union.....new visitors to this blog see a gray bar at the top of the page:

If they click on the "Learn More" link in the gray strip then they go to this Google page about cookies.

The image below shows the message that was provided to Blogger users by Google:

When I first noticed that this was happening, I was amused that (according to Google) it is my responsibility to warn people in the European Union that Google uses cookies. LOL! "You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works". In my spare time I'll be sure to watch all visitors to this blog and make sure that Google's notice about their use of cookies is correctly displayed to each visitor.

Google's "Learn more" link gave me some instructions for how to see what the Google's cookies notification looks like. Since I'm not in the EU, I had to go to this help page and read all the way to the bottom of their "Frequently Asked Questions" before I could figure out how to do it. Try it.

Firefox privacy preferences.
I've long used the Firefox browser and 1) set the preferences to "Tell site that I do not want to be tracked". Also, I use the 2) NoScript and 3) Adblock Plus Add-ons for Firefox. These give me control over which scripts run and what ads I see while browsing the web.

I suggest that all visitors to this blog from the European Union, Mars, or beyond try steps 1-3 (above) for a better web browsing experience.

2 comments:

  1. KeirAugust 12, 2015 at 12:07 AM

    This notice is so annoying (besides, as you state, idiotic). Now when I visit these sites or my own in incognito or privacy mode, I can't disable them and it takes up an ugly chunk of the screen. I've ad-blocked them away in Firefox and Chrome, but I have to do so for every single Blogspot site; I can't find one single 'kill' button that removes every instance at once.

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    Replies
    1. John SchmidtAugust 13, 2015 at 2:37 AM

      I guess that by using the Blogspot service I'm one of the folks who who has helped turn web browsing into an obstacle course full of annoyances. "Free" services like Blogspot are never really free. My use of the Blogspot service provides Google (or is it now "Alphabet"? https://abc.xyz/#) with another opportunity to collect data on people who browse the internet.

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